Mythical creatures by Kerby Rosanes!

My coloring book Mythomorphia by Kerby Rosanes has arrived, and the pictures are awesome. They feature mermaids, gnomes, kitsunes, dragons, phoenixes... any critter that has featured in stories from long ago.

Many of the drawings are double-spreads, but I chose to start with a single-page one, to warm up.

Harpy. Drawing by Kerby Rosanes, color by Amy

A harpy, from Greek and Roman mythology, is a rapacious monster described as having a woman's head and body and a bird's wings and claws. It is often depicted as a bird of prey with a woman's face. The word can be also used to describe a grasping, unpleasant woman.

I picked a palette of blues and greens for the feathers, and used my white gel ink pen to give some highlights to the tips of the feathers. Yes, colors can be too raw at times, like for the teal colors of the feathers, so I toned it down with some warm grey at 70% saturation. 

I decided against giving her human skin tones, since she does look evil. A dark greyish tone seemed to me to convey her other-worldliness better.

I quite like the way the feet turned out... yellow like most bird feet, but given more depth with orange on one side to convey shadow. 

Stuck for the color to use on the harpy's helmet (or is it supposed to be the beak?), I asked the family. R said "red" but I went with orangey-red instead, since orange is a complementary color to blue. Worked quite nicely. 

The tree and leaves were quickly done after that. I went with a yellow-green for the leaves, rather than a blue-ish green, which wouldn't have provided enough contrast with the main subject. 

The two hidden objects here were the axe and a goblet with lighted candle in it. They are too small to expend that much time and energy on, but I tried to convey metal surfaces with the use of contrasting tones.

Then there is the matter of the background, which I have left white. I posted this work on my Instagram feed with a question: Is this a WIP, or can it be considered finished with a blank white background?

Someone said it's a WIP. Another person said it's finished.

The expanse is a bit too much work for me to color in the background. But I have seen the payoffs from the effort. Some color pencil enthusiasts really do a lot of work on the backgrounds of pictures they color in, going so far even as to draw extra elements in.

Goodbye, Johanna Basford, hello, Kerby Rosanes.

Limiting the color palette, Part Deux

I have taken another look at the color palettes I saved to my board on Pinterest lately, and have decided to continue being more disciplined in my choice of color. (See my last post on this subject here.)

Sites such as Design Seeds, for example, put on display dozens of beautiful photographs of scenery, nature or every day objects which are beautiful because of the way the colors work in them. Alongside are color palettes drawn from the photos themselves, so a photo of cactus succulents, for example, would produce a palette of dusty rose, sage green and deeper purples and pinks, perhaps with cream or warm greys. Nature really does show us how some colors just work together.

The following work, another from my Johanna Basford book, The Enchanted Forest, shows the result of working with a limited palette:

 

The colors are dull greens - no "raw" greens here - used along with dusty pinks, purples and some browns or warm greys... much like the palette for the cactus succulents.

The yellows of the bug wings and the centre of the flower kind of stick out -- a lesson in what happens when you depart from the palette. Or maybe the yellows work, I am not sure.

Another recent  work I did, also with a view to restricting the color palette, was this one:

 

I uploaded this to my Pinterest board on my color pencil work too, and also to Instagram, where it is continuing to draw "likes" -- more than the other picture -- probably because of the element of whimsy in this one. Notice the quaint tree houses on stilts and the green house with Moorish architectural elements in it.

For this one, the greens were yellow-green (chartreuse) rather than sage green, and all other colors were from an earthy palette - browns, warm greys, yellows, ochres and some pumpkin orange. I doubt a bright blue or red would sit well here. It's just a feeling!

This whole color pencil adventure has taught me a lot about color. I find myself looking at things in a new way, seeing how the colors work, such as whether they are in ombre palettes, flowing smoothly one into the next, or whether they contrast each other.

As an aside here: I'm fast running out of pages in my Basford Enchanted Forest book. Will I get another of her works? I think not. She draws far too many tiny leaves that are a test of patience, and because they are that small, they don't offer much scope by way of shading possibilities. Her other books that don't feature "enchanted forests" may have fewer leaves and plants, perhaps?

I've ordered a new book from Book Depository, Mythomorphia by the illustrator Kerby Rosanes, which has taken the world of adult coloring by storm. This is his third book, his earlier works being  Animorphia and Imagimorphia.

And I still haven't given up on making and coloring in my own drawings. It's just that Life happens, and it did happen in a big way this past month, shaking my family to its core and yanking the rug from under our collective feet. So we are picking up the pieces and finding a new pattern to move on with.

I hope to carve out time to do this strangely calming hobby from hereon.